Stuart Henry (Hasluck, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I appreciate the opportunity to speak in the grievance debate to again address the House on behalf of the electorate of Hasluck, which has been adversely impacted by the proposed BGC brickworks to be built on Perth airport land. I am deeply sorry and very disappointed that my constituents’ and my concerns regarding this development appear to have fallen on deaf ears and that, in this instance, our government has failed the people who elected me to represent them. On the 15th of last month, the Minister for Transport and Regional Services approved the building of these brickworks. This decision has devastated the faith of many in my community who believed that, somehow, the minister would get this decision right. He did not. This is not the way it is supposed to work and, if this brickworks goes ahead, the community surrounding the airport will bear the burden of this mistake for generations.

Although I believe the Minister for Transport and Regional Services has made a serious error in approving this proposal, I am relieved to some degree that the conditions placed upon this approval have at least some chance of preventing our worst fears from being realised. But conditions are not enough to make a wrong decision into a right one, and I would argue that the minister should never have been put in the position of having to make this decision. This issue may technically concern Commonwealth land, but this is purely a Western Australian matter and should have been decided by the people it affects and the government of Western Australia.

I sincerely believe that there was much more the state government could and should have done to provide alternative sites on which BGC could develop brickworks—for instance, the state government could have done more in partnership with the federal government to make alternative sites more commercially and logistically viable. There are other sites which would have enabled brickworks to be located much further from existing homes and community facilities—where air quality was not already seriously compromised, where the chimneystack could be built high enough to prevent problems from emissions and without causing potential risk adjacent to the flight path. There are other sites where local government leaders are keen to create employment and to attract such a development but, essentially, we all found ourselves on this path because BGC felt they had no reasonable alternative than to seek to build their brickworks on the Commonwealth land within Perth airport.

I must confess to being seriously disappointed with the behaviour of many state government leaders. The state members for Belmont and Midland, Eric Ripper and Michelle Roberts, both senior ministers in the state Labor government, were happy to sit back and watch as others gave freely of their time on this issue in the hope that this decision would increase the chance of Labor regaining Hasluck at the next election. Along with Senator Sterle and the Leader of the Opposition—the often missing member for Brand—all they could do was to make absurd allegations about nuclear waste dumps that did nothing but insult the intelligence of my constituents.

It is all too easy to say that people’s concerns have been taken into account. It is easy to say that this will be ‘the best brickworks around’. The community are not stupid—far from it. They see through this for what it is: empty posturing. We can say what we like; they know they have been overruled in this matter even though the truth is that the plant BGC plans to use is a second-hand plant from Germany that is already several years old. The truth is that the Western Australian Department of Health raised serious concerns about adverse health effects on those living nearby. The fact is that the Department of the Environment and Heritage found a long list of issues it felt were still too uncertain to justify approving this proposal. Those issues are referred to in the department’s environmental assessment report—for example, the proposed scrubber technology has not been used in Western Australia and the details of how the system will be managed have not been provided. BGC has not provided sufficient detail on whether the proposal is likely to meet the proposed stack emission limits.

The department is not satisfied that the information provided to date is sufficiently rigorous to conclude that the modelling addresses air quality concerns. The department cannot be confident that the proposal will not result in adverse health impacts if only because of the uncertainty about the existing pollutant load and the speed at which existing brickworks will reduce their emissions. The proposal will require greater regulatory involvement than normal airport developments. The report states:

Therefore, this proposal presents a range of challenges and uncertainties that have not been resolved.

As environmental management philosophies go, wishful thinking went out decades ago. Uncertainties should be sorted out before we allow these brickworks to be built. The conditions put on this proposal do not give my constituents any reassurance, especially when BGC’s reputation in Western Australia for compliance with government regulations leaves much to be desired.

How can we expect the community to have faith in conditions when this sorry tale actually started with BGC and Westralia Airports Corporation blatantly denying that a brickworks was even being considered, when they tried to get away without even having to hold a public consultation phase and only did so after intense community pressure? This is 2006. It is not good enough for us to approve major industrial developments amidst uncertainties about the negative impacts they will cause. It is not good enough for us to allow the system to ignore sensible, well-argued concerns of thousands of people who have made their homes and lives in this area.

Given the negative impact of this decision and the unmet concerns of the community which have been reinforced by the environmental assessment report, the Minister for Transport and Regional Services should agree to include a community consultative group as part of the monitoring process, working alongside the airport environment officer. This would go a long way to overcoming some of the community scepticism and cynicism over this decision, adding an appropriate level of transparency to this process already weighted heavily in favour of the proponents.

BGC is an important organisation in Western Australia and I would be remiss if I did not give credit to the contribution it has made and continues to make to our state’s prosperity. Companies like this should be encouraged to invest in Western Australia—indeed in all Australian states. Although the best information I have been able to find in my research is that the reported brick shortage in Western Australia is not as much of an issue as many claim and is compounded by skill shortages, I do support BGC—or any other company, for that matter—in its efforts to introduce more competition into the brick-making industry in Western Australia. But this does not and cannot make Perth airport a suitable site.

We can dress it up with conditions and reassurances as much as we like but that plain and self-evident truth remains: if Perth airport were not Commonwealth land offering a loophole, this proposal would never have been made. Westralia Airports Corporation’s own master plan for managing this Commonwealth land states clearly that it will:

... implement good neighbour policies and contemplate only land-uses that complement that of adjacent communities.

How can anyone claim that brickworks built less than the length of a school oval away from people’s homes be considered to complement the community, especially when the airport’s own flight path requirements prevent the emissions stack from being high enough to avoid health dangers from pollution?

Notwithstanding the shortcomings of the state government in this matter, how can we as a federal government allow commercial developments to go ahead in direct opposition to local and state wishes? This proposal cannot be argued to be in the national interest, so how can we as a federal government use a legal loophole created by the Airports Act 1996 to overrule the people and the elected government of Western Australia?

One of the reasons I am proud to be part of this government under the Prime Minister’s leadership, and what I believe has been this government’s greatest strength, is the Prime Minister’s steadfast refusal to take the Australian people for granted. I will not and cannot take the people of my electorate for granted. Labor Party members have predictably accused me of not doing enough; others have commented on my tireless efforts to stop the brickworks and to get the message of the community’s opposition across in Canberra. I am happy and proud to have taken a serious interest in this matter and to have been relentless in representing my constituents’ interests and views on this issue. I will continue to represent my community—my electorate—without fear or favour, irrespective of where the opposition comes from.